Larissa Shmailo

Saturday, September 07, 2019

Trump's cuts to planned military construction projects for his racist wall steals $400 milllion for 10 projects desperately needed for jobs and infrastructure in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. Schools and day care centers for our service peoples' children have also been axed across the country. All this is in clear violation of the Constitution, which states that only Congress has the power of the purse. Will Congress takes this lying down? Sadly, its belly-down supine posture says, thanks, sir, please give me another.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

I am the child of immigrants interned in camps by Hitler and sent to Siberia by Stalin. I am always amazed by the entitlement of Americans and some foreign nationals not blessed with this authoritarian pedigree. I worry if I don't have my prescription number when I call the pharmacy, if I've gotten ahead of anyone on line and am terrified of any government letter. But at the slightest slight, Americans will hold a roomful of people up to get what they think is their due, and their due is always ten times what I would ask. And they expect good treatment, even when they are in the wrong, always ready to defend their bad behavior. I was born apologizing. Needless to say, some poets are immigrants, and some (you know who) are as American as Donald Trump.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

SLY BANG

Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang is written with tremendous energy and moves at an exhilarating pace, yet it dwells on depraved characters and actions. Almost nobody is nice in this novel about serial killers, mad scientists, FBI agents and evildoers.

The plot centers around Nora, an FBI agent with telepathic and scientifically grounded superpowers, who is hunted by Ouspensky, a scientist, satanist, and Nazi who wants to destroy the world using nuclear colliders. Among Nora’s defenders are Michael, a serial killer, and Andrew and Aubrey, fellow FBI agents who seem to be the only characters without obsessions, perversities, and obscene desires.

Indeed, the book reads like a psychotic episode. People die and come back to life. The line between dream and reality is not entirely clear. Mind-reading is possible. Strange, advanced technologies propel the action at times. Some characters have superhuman abilities: Most of the men have extraordinary strength and beat up a slew of other people to prove it. They can even break their way out of manacles.

And that is where the satire lies. The book, while it portrays horrific actions, makes fun of superhuman male figures and the traditional ideal man. Their activities are so outlandish that readers may find themselves laughing out loud and cheering as Nora outlasts most of them through her grit, pluck, and resilience. As she contemplates being saved by a man, she writes “hey, this damsel in distress thing really turns them on . . . subconscious hostility that they want me to be harmed?” The book takes direct aim at the fantasies of some males, making them so extreme that their absurdity becomes crystal clear.

Sly Bang’s satire on the whole is extreme—it begins with a scene of Nora masturbating under command while being remotely surveilled. She is alone, sleep deprived, and very scared. Serial killers lurk blocks away, pretending to be friends, and attempt to confuse her through remote communications. She needs to fight the depravities of the males, who are lampooned in their aggressiveness and inability to treat Nora straight. And Nora has her own issues. She treats men badly by manipulating their feelings, loving them and leaving them, cheating on them, and so forth. It may be a kind of visceral revenge.

To top it all off, Nora and her “friends”—neither she nor we are entirely sure who is or isn’t on her side—need to save the world from Ouspensky’s attempt to destroy it just for kicks. The comic book element makes war itself seem cartoonishly absurd, driven not by a desire for territory or money or power, but to dominate women in a psycho-sexual manner.

This is a hilarious and horrifying novel. It depicts the worst humanity is capable of, but what keeps Sly Bang from becoming overwhelmed by the depravity it describes is the writerly energy of Shmailo. Wise cracks and madcap scenes burst one after another in a buoyant fashion—so it goes down easy in spite of the horrors it describes.

The Hybrid Female No - Sexual Sadism in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

The key to sexual sadism is the sadist’s belief that his victim needs the rape, grope, incest, assault, slut-shaming, domination, objectivization, catcall, invalidation, humiliation, cop, do, make, feel, frot, fuck. For “wanting the rape,” we have the mythos of hypersexualized underage Lolitas seducing hapless middle-age men; sexual assault victims wearing (or not) any random article of clothing deemed by male perception as desirable and therefore dangerous are per heteronormative convention “asking for it.” Many Bible Belt zealots affirm that a rape cannot occur without consent, that “good” women have the capacity to “shut down” an attack through pheromonal signals. There is a contract fully executed in the mind of the sadist unknown to most victims, an unfortunately mainstream contract that informs the violence of sexual assault. It is the doctrine of the hybrid female “no”, the No that means Yes in a perversion of the Nietzschean maxim.

And if, to the perp’s surprise, “no” does turn out to mean “no,” male domination in the form of law, custom, or divine writ proclaims that the man may again hear the word “yes.” Because she (the bitch) “had it coming” and deserves punishment through sexual pain. Perceived to be sexual, a state expressly forbidden and demonstrated to the edification of all women by the gruesomely violent deaths of Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, women deserve to be raped, groped, incested, done, made, even killed. Again, “no” in the male mind, means “yes” and is a hybrid, dually valent noun.

We live in the main in the male mind. In “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” David Foster Wallace makes this point in extremis by eliminating the female voice completely. Using the hybrid form of fiction masquerading as the creative nonfiction of an interview series, the “interviews” feature only the answers of men and none of the questions of women. Where an apparent female interlocutor is inferred to speak, only a blank, voiceless capital “Q” appears on the page, furiously followed by a voluminous series of male explanations for versions of rape. The female is absent entirely and only the men speak. What we know of the women in their lives is entirely contained in the men’s minds, through their perceptions, their wants, their desires.

From bondage to emotional abuse, Wallace demonstrates the thrill of non-consent and the balm to conscience of a perceived acquiescence. Ignoring and overcoming the subject’s will while hiding behind a mock or defrauded “yes” is the name of the game. This tension, the hybrid yes-no is encapsulated by Wallace’s sadist who ceremoniously and loquaciously describes how he manipulates female consent to be tied up and then used for nonconsensual ulterior needs. For these hideous yet familiar men, it is licit to obtain yes through manipulation and lies, like Bundy waving a fake broken arm before his murder victims. An informed woman is a woman who might say prevail in saying “no.”

Wallace’s huge and rococo mansplaining in the face of unrestrained male sexual adventurism, and the voiceless trapped abused females, seen only through the eyes of perps, engendered a genuine terror in me. The hybrid interview format contributes to the viscerally frightening reality of these men. This is especially true in Wallace’s interview with the man who falls in love with a woman determined to love and console her serial killer rapist. In exception to the other female objects in the stories, there is a detailed portrait of this woman who achieves the affections of her perp. For only when the female gaze adheres to the requirement of universal compassion and kindness in the face of the most extreme abuse is a woman loveable. Indeed, Wallace’s description of the female orgasm in this interview was akin to death throes. We are to die beaming and bestowing grace.

In the “Hideous” interviews which draw a direct line between the make, the lying about love to a woman in order to use her, to the hatred of a serial killer for women, we never leave the male mind. Sexual violence, physical and emotional, is the main driver of Wallace’s hideous men and they are ubiquitous in their MAGA hats and endowed professorial chairs. The hybrid form brilliantly depicts the reality of unbridled joy in female pain and the violent convolutions of toxic masculinity.

And was the suicide Wallace a hideous man? I must say I suspected it for a moment in the interview in which a man asserts that a woman who is raped has an important knowledge of herself, a gnosis that is unattainable any other way. The acquaintance is either suspicious or genius. The “Hideous” interviews are a spectrum of sadism, an orgy of perverse male needs, of ratiocinations and hatreds. In this culture of torture and death, women become real by disappearing and dying, emotionally and physically. Need I say that the interview with the perp who “loves” ends with the obligatory chant of BITCH CUNT SLUT DYKE GASH? With hyperrealism, the hybrid interviews depict the imminent threat of death with which all women, if truth be told, live.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

With the advent of Trump, we live in an age of cruelty-child abuse, bullying, vicious ad hominem attacks, racism and misogyny construed to create maximum hurt, maximum shame. Nazis troll and shoot; the Klan sheets are out; the meanest forms of discourse are employed. Honor, concern for the humble and weak are gone; these now have targets on their backs. We have become the Roman circus, but instead of gladiators, small children are torn apart for the spectacle to satisfy the bloodlust of the Trump supporter, who must be defeated in strength, the only coin of the realm they understand.

Thursday, August 01, 2019

Thrilled that BOTH AWP panels I am participating in have been accepted for the 2020 San Antonio conference! I will be moderating "Translating the Untranslatable: A Reading of International Experimental Poetry" with Marc Vincenz, Helene Cardona, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Michele Gil-Montero. I will be a panelist on moderator Olga Livshin's "What Kind of Times Are These? Immigrant Poets and the New Politics of Resistance" with Valzhyna Mort, Anna Halberstadt, and Mariya Deykute. See you in San Antonio!!!!

Monday, July 29, 2019

One of Josef Goebbels's propaganda principles was "Accuse your enemy of what you are guilty." As Congress investigates Jared Kushner's substandard Baltimore "Kushnerville" rentals, Trump lashes out in racist attack upon Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings, representative of Baltimore. Now Trump is attacking whole ciites. You would think people would rise up and vote against him in the next election, but the tactic worked as voter suppression in Detroit in 2016: See, the subtext of his message ran, the Democrats have left you in poverty, have left you in the lurch, why vote for them? I hope the consciousness raising by the Baltimore Sun and the black Obama officials helps, but Trump is a master at propaganda and must never be taken lightly.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Nazi theorists followed by Bannon and Miller advocate creating a feudal state - literally. The "deep state" they wish to destroy is education, social services, envionmental protections, anything that impedes the ruling class's amassing of wealth and power. Race wars keep people preoccupied, divided, and disempowered. Believe these people when they tell you who they are.